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Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
Doe
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Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.
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My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.
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My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.
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To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
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Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.
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Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.
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The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.
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Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.
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Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.
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..Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating - taking something for one’s own use - need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
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Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.
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I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.
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Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks